This was true as programming languages evolved too. It was so much easier to write scripting languages than C. You could crap our scripts like crazy - no cc refusing to give you a binary to get in your way.

Clearly..it still wasn't a silver bullet. Because output as a metric is a bad one. I thought it was only one managers valued..but apparently Anthropic has convinced devs to value it finally? i guess it def hits that dopamine receptor hard.

I'm curious to check how faster AAA games will hit the market in the next years compared to the pre-LLM era. Or how much of the aging COBOL code base out there will disappear in the next decade.

When concrete things like that start to happen, then I will start to believe in the 10x claim.

10x the amount of code or features =/= 10x the speed of software development.

If AI is the silver bullet, I do not understand why so many shot-up projects are still wandering around the freelance market.

I've been thinking about this and have wanted to discuss it with people. I think the 10x thing has been broken, but I don't think it's because the premise of "No Silver Bullet" was false - I think it's because LLMs have the ability to navigate some of the _essential_ complexity of problems.

I don't think anyone has really wrestled with the implications of that yet - we've started talking about "deskilling" and "congnitive debt" but mostly in the context of "programmers are going to forget how to structure code - how to use the syntax of their languages, etc et etc)." I'm not worried about that as it's the same sort of thing we've seen for decades - compilers, higher-order languages, better abstracts, etc etc etc.

The fact that LLMs are able to wrestle with essential complexity means that using them is going to push us further and further from the actual problems we're trying to solve. Right now, it's the wrestling with problems that helps us understand what those problems are. As our organizations adopt LLMs that are able to take on _those_ problems - that is, customer problems, not problems of data, scaling, and so forth - will we hit a brick wall where we lose that understanding? Where we keep shipping stuff but it gets further and further from what our customers need? How do we avoid that?

The premise of "no silver bullet" is wrong (LLM just made it clear, but it has always been wrong).

The premise is that the software development had been mostly "essential complexity" rather than "accidental complexity." But I think anyone who worked as SE in the past decade would have found the opposite is true.

It's not only that software development is full of accidental complexity. Programmers (and the decision makers above them) have always been actively creating accidental complexity. Making a GUI program hasn't gotten easier since Visual Basic. In fact for each JavaScript framework and technique that wraps around DOM render engine, it has got harder over years. Until LLMs made it easier again (by creating a permanent dependency on LLMs. If you intend to edit the code manually afterwards, it became even harder!)

For your sake I hope that your pay is determined by your “output”, and not your long-term usefulness.

> that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development.

> AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

Those are not the same.

You can add 5 different features to a project and still provide less value that the 5 lines diff that resolves a performance bottleneck.

Just because code has been put out does not mean the software is “developed”.

10x would only be possible if your output was low before Claude Code